Moving on from Britain’s John Barry, two pieces of work from the highly versatile US composer and conductor here showing contrasting styles that equally express the dark and disturbing. Of all his many scores, from Papillon to Total Recall, The Omen to Alien to LA Confidential, these are two of his best.

For Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson as the cynical private detective and Faye Dunaway as the femme fatale widow, both under the shadow of corrupt local politics and her disturbing father, Noah Cross, Goldsmith creates a heart-wrenching love theme played beautifully by trumpeter Uan Rasey, and a score that scratches into a dark past.

For Planet of the Apes, meanwhile (1968, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner) while becoming mainstream sci-fi success, Goldsmith employ conventional, accessible classical soundtrack music, but something more akin to modern Stockhausen - prickly stops and starts, shrill woodwind and brass, all to conjure a sense of a fevered dream, a nightmare alternative world in which Charlton Heston wakes to find himself hunted and imprisoned our hairy humanoid cousins.

Jon Spencer’s explosive solo to Marianne Faithfull’s gentle honesty, Bill Ryder-Jones love songs to music by the film director David Lynch, this week’s album roundup embraces a wealth of experimentation and styles

Word of the week: It's the infinitesimally small subatomic particle which forms matter, a type of curdled cheese from soured milk, is used in computer language and in sci-fi fiction names, but where in lyrics?

Word of the week: With an appropriately flamboyant sound and rhythm it’s a word best known for the title of Freddie Mercury’s epic Bohemian Queen song, and several major classical works, but where is it used in song lyrics?

Word of the week: It’s an adjective with a beautiful sound. It means the characteristics of our ape cousins, but of course sharing almost all the same DNA, it also means us. But where is simian in lyrics?

Word of the Week: It sizzles off the tongue, it’s the name of a great inventor, and after him, a unit of magnetic flux density, and it’s also a car, and in slang recreational drug, but where does it appear in song lyrics?

Word of the Week: It’s a word with a beautiful sound formed from the Latin word, umbra, for shade, is not merely an expanding accessory to shelter from the rain, also a general term of protection or a thing made of many parts

Word of the Week: It’s a famous Bjork album, but where does it come up in lyrics? The root of this word relates to the evening and its tolling bell, but also bats, Venus, a cocktail, and in slang – a kind, smart, cool girl

Word of the Week: It’s a slim, fast dog, the name of a car, a ship, a tank and a light aircraft, and also slang for recreational use of nitrous oxide from small metal containers, but where does it appear in song?

Word of the week: It’s an idealised location of magnificence and beauty with Chinese origins described in Coleridge’s poem, and a 1980 film starring Olivia Newton-John and song performed with ELO, but where else does it appear in lyrics?

Word of the week: Following on from zephyr last week, we work backwards to a colour term that can pertain to cheap books, a fish, a mussel, insect, a certificate for gold, and in urban slang, council workers wearing hi-vis jackets

Word of the week: Launching a new Song Bar series highlighting words or phrases used in lyrics for the oddness or musicality, let’s start with a z-word, and several examples including Madonna, Bill Callaghan, Frank Sinatra and Ian Dury

Song of the Day: Continuing a week of WW1 anniversary songs, in an unusually tender song from the heavy rock band, it’s a tragic first-person narration of the Battle of the Somme where 19,000 British soldiers were killed before noon

Song of the Day: Next in a week of songs dedicated to the First World War Armistice centenary, a deeply sad and vivid song by Ray Davies about the fleeting life of a young soldier killed in 1916 from the 1969 album, Arthur

Song of the Day: Continuing on the First World War Armistice Day centenary, a trio of some of the finest songs about war from the British singer and composer from her acclaimed 2011 album Let England Shake

Song of the Day: Today’s date, 7 November, is significant in all sorts of ways - elections, revolutions, births, deaths, but it’s the day in 1908 when two of America’s most famous outlaws were reportedly killed on the run in Bolivia

Song of the Day: In the wake of the most vital mid-term US elections in a generation, the 1972 rock song that is often wheeled out on these occasions, but less known is that it is a reworking of an earlier song, Reflected